The deafening blast of the explosion still echoed through the immense space of the amphitheater. A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the thousands of spectators in the stands. Thick, pitch black smoke curled slowly upward from the smoking crater in the crystal floor, as if the earth itself was exhaling a toxic breath. Everyone stared with open mouths at the exact spot where the elevated ring had stood just seconds ago.
On the hovering platform, the Hype Man stood as if struck by lightning. His staff, which only moments ago had been spitting purple bolts of lightning, hung limp and useless in his cramped hand. He scrambled frantically for his golden microphone, his eyes wide with pure bewilderment.
“WAIT! WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?!” the Hype Man screamed, his vocal cords raw and cracking through the speakers. “THEY BLEW STRAIGHT THROUGH THE FLOOR! THIS IS NOT PART OF THE SCHEDULE! WHERE… WHERE ARE THEY?!”
Even before the echo of his screams faded, a figure darted onto the hovering platform. King Solomon’s small assistant, dressed in an oversized velvet robe, tripped over his own hem and clawed wildly at the Hype Man’s shoulder. He leaned forward and began babbling at an absurdly high speed into the announcer’s ear, his hands slicing nervously through the air.
The Hype Man jerked his head back, his face twisted in disbelief. He held the microphone half away from his mouth, but the magical audio systems still picked up his voice flawlessly.
“WAIT… ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS?!” the Hype Man snapped at the assistant.
The assistant nodded in sheer panic, ducked back close to the Hype Man’s ear, and began babbling even faster, his finger pointing exaggeratedly toward the black, bottomless abyss in the crystal.
The Hype Man swallowed visibly. The theatrical, indestructible energy that had defined him throughout the entire tournament melted away in a fraction of a second. He slowly brought the golden microphone back to his lips. His hand was trembling so violently that the metal tapped against his teeth.
“People… listen,” the Hype Man began, a thick, heavy lump forming in his throat. “It appears… that we are located right on the border of the Goddess Realm…”
At the edge of the VIP stands, between the flickering neon shadows and the smell of spilled liquor, Faustus froze at the exact same moment that Juro, deeper in the stands, snapped his head around. Both men’s eyes widened. The cigar clamped between Faustus’s teeth dropped onto the wood in a small shower of sparks. Juro’s mouth pulled into a tight, hard line, his palm gripping the stone balustrade so fiercely that the marble began to crack.
No… raced through the minds of Faustus and Juro simultaneously. That can only mean one thing…
The Hype Man forced the next words out of his throat, as if uttering them could summon the devil himself:
“It appears… that they have just been blasted straight into the Hellverse! An underground cave system… supposedly the exact location… where the Skullies live!”
The reaction in the arena was instant and ruthless.
There was no silence anymore; a massive wave of pure, primal mortal terror erupted. A merciless howling tore through the stands, instantly shifting into hysterical shrieks. Several spectators in the front rows passed out with a dull thud, collapsing over the wooden benches like empty sacks of flour. Chaotic masses of people began climbing wildly over one another, sprinting up the stairs, desperately searching for the exits of the amphitheater.
In the dead center of the central platform, Silarias looked at Nyx. His ash gray robes whipped and hissed in the rising thermal drafts coming from the pit.
“Skullies?” Silarias asked aloud, his voice drenched in cold, genuine confusion. “Wait… what?”
At the exact moment those words left his lips, something utterly surreal happened.
The hundreds of panicking people sprinting screaming through the halls, the spectators hanging mid air in a desperate leap from the stands, and the guards storming forward… everyone froze mid movement. As if time itself was put on pause, they hung completely still in the air, floating above the benches and stairs. Slowly, with a synchronized, eerie mechanical motion, hundreds of heads turned around at the exact same time. Hundreds of pairs of wide, terrifying eyes locked directly onto Silarias and Nyx.
In the absolute center of the frozen, floating mass, Juro leaped to his feet with a brutal crack that echoed from his stand. The stones beneath his boots splintered.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE PAID ATTENTION, KID!” Juro roared at the top of his lungs, his voice booming over the motionless crowd. “HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS LEGEND?!”
Before Silarias could react, the Hype Man’s hovering platform was abruptly shoved aside by a blast of magical energy. King Solomon’s small assistant muscled his way toward the central speaker array, roughly snatched the magical microphone out of the Hype Man’s hands, and brought it to his own mouth.
The timid, nervous posture of the assistant melted away like snow in the sun. A dark, sinister grin stretched across his face, and his voice suddenly sounded distorted, heavy, and echoing across the entire arena, as if he was speaking on behalf of something far larger and far more evil buried deep underground.
“Ladies and gentlemen of this exalted amphitheater…” the assistant spoke with a cold, sarcastic undertone. “You think this was an accident? A random clash of two hyped up kids? How naive.”
He leaned far over the edge of the platform, his eyes gleaming in the red and purple glow radiating from the pit.
“Thousands of years ago, long before the first stone of this arena was ever laid, the border of the Hellverse was torn open by the Skullies,” the assistant continued, the magical amplification making the stone walls vibrate. “Not ordinary demons, but cursed entities of pure bone and rotting soul, born from the most brutal executions of the very first divine realm. Legends tell that the primordial rulers forged a pact with their archdemon, Abaddon the Bone Devourer. In exchange for the power above ground, the cave system below was surrendered as their eternal slaughterhouse. A sinister curse, sealed with blood and black magic, which demands that the ground above them is periodically fed with raw, living warriors!”
The assistant managed to push a sick, softly hissing laugh through the microphone.
“And make no mistake… these monstrosities are not just hungry, they are feisty! They hunt in blindingly fast, lethal swarms, feeding on the pure mortal terror of their prey and stripping meat from bones within a single heartbeat. They have not tasted fresh, untouched flesh with such high spiritual energy in centuries. Miki and Ren did not just fall… they have just become the main course in the butchers’ nest!”
“YO!” Silarias roared.
The cold, restrained calm that usually enveloped him like an impenetrable shield shattered completely in a single fraction of a second. His ash gray robes surged upward as a brutal, thermal shockwave detonated straight from his chest. The air around his face began to bulge and boil as his aura spiked to a dangerous boiling point. His eyes, burning brightly like two blazing solar cores, stared fixedly into the deep, smoking abyss of the crystal pit.
“Do you seriously think we are going to let them rot down there?!”
If those freaks think they can just swallow up Miki and Ren, they are dead wrong, Silarias thought, while black flames were already beginning to crackle beneath his fingernails. Those two kids drive me absolutely insane, but nobody touches them except us.
Even before the echo of his raw shout could bounce across the ruined platform, the air behind him collapsed inward as the molecules were physically compressed. A crackling, blue and white discharge of Rajin Volt energy slammed into the tiled floor with a deafening crack. Beat was already standing there. His body was trembling from the accumulated tension, his muscles pulled as tight as thin steel cables, and bright bolts of lightning continuously arched across his clothing and skin.
“Stop talking so much, Sil!” Beat snapped with a dangerous grimace, his teeth clamped together while sparks flew from his speech. “We are going in right now!”
On his other side, Aurelius stepped forward. The wounded, aristocratic calm on his face was gone, replaced by an icy, cutting mask of pure, ruthless focus. His hand was already resting on the hilt of his sword.
“If they are dead before we get down there, I will kill them myself,” Aurelius muttered ice cold.
Not a single word more was exchanged. The three boys shared one single, lightning fast glance.
In a perfectly synchronized, visually devastating flash of gold, blue, and silver, Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius dove forward at the exact same time. Their bodies cleaved through the thick plumes of smoke and vanished like three crashing comets straight into the pitch black, bottomless pit, plunging toward the freezing darkness of the Hellverse.
Hundreds of meters deeper into the bone dry, pitch black depths of the earth, there was absolutely no trace left of royal dignity, heroism, or tactical insight.
The air currents in the massive, vertical shaft howled like a raging hurricane. Chunks of crystal, rubble, and swirling dust whipped around them in a chaotic tornado as the abyss swallowed them whole.
“YOUR FAULT, YOU BRAT! YOU CRASHED FULL FORCE INTO MY ANGLE!” Miki shrieked at the absolute top of her lungs. Her vocal cords were cracking harshly over the screaming wind blowing past her ears. She was hanging upside down in the air, while bright, crackling white spiritual fire sparked chaotically and uncontrollably from her forearms, briefly bathing the dark rock walls in a ghostly light. “YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO FLASH YOUR STUPID HEAD RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING!”
I swear to god, if we survive this I am going to beat him to a pulp, boiled in Miki’s head, while the sheer terror squeezed her throat shut. He always ruins everything with his ego!
“MY FAULT?!” Ren shrieked back at maximum volume. He was spinning like a top through the air, his arms and legs flailing wildly to find balance in the free fall. “YOU THREW THAT STUPID, CLUMSY KICK WHILE I WAS ALREADY AT MAXIMUM FLASH SPEED! YOUR DUMB TRASH MOVE JUST DRILLED US AND THIS ENTIRE PLATFORM THROUGH THREE DOUBLE LAYERS OF CRYSTAL!”
She seriously doesn’t understand a single thing! Ren thought desperately, as the rocks blasted past his face. I was trying to cover the angle! She is the one kicking around blindly!
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH! YOU CANNOT EVEN STEER, YOU CLOWN!”
“I AM NOT A CLOWN, YOU ARE A WALKING MATCHSTICK WITH A SHORT FUSE AND ZERO BRAINS!”
The childish, hysterical screaming match was abruptly and mercilessly interrupted as the bottom of the immensely large cave system rushed up to meet them at terrifying speed.
“SHIELD! PUT UP A SHIELD!” Miki screamed.
“I AM ALREADY TRYING THAT, YOU BRAT!” Ren roared back.
With a gigantic, numbing crash that penetrated the deepest layers of stone like a massive earthquake, Miki and Ren drilled straight through a thick forest of ancient, dangling stalactites. The rock splintered into thousands of razor sharp boulders. A fraction of a second later, the two slammed with a devastating impact straight through the solid stone floor of a gigantic, catacomb like cavern.
The impact was so severe that it punched a small crater into the ground. A massive, suffocating cloud of pulverized rock, ancient gravel, and rotting bone dust flared high into the air and swallowed the entire space.
When the first thick clouds of dust slowly settled, the true scale of the cavern became visible. Miki was lying flat on her back among the smoking debris of the crater, violently coughing and sputtering as she angrily rubbed the dust out of her eyes with an agitated expression.
“Shit rocks… shit cave… shit Ren…” Miki coughed, trying to hoist herself up on her elbows. Her entire body ached.
A meter away, Ren was lying half buried under a chaotic mountain of crystal debris and crumbled rocks, his legs still sticking rigidly and lifelessly into the air while he frantically kept muttering to himself under his breath.
“Next time… I am just flashing straight over you…” sounded muffled from underneath the stones.
Miki rolled her eyes, shook the dust out of her hair, and lifted a heavy rock off Ren’s back. “Get up, idiot. It stinks like death in here.”
Ren scrambled up coughing, rubbed his tailbone, and looked around wildly. The silence that fell after their crash was suffocating. The air was freezing cold, thick with dust, and drenched in a chilling, undeniable stench of rotting meat and ancient bone.
“Where… where in god’s name did we end up?” Ren whispered, his anger toward Miki instantly forgotten as pure fear tightened its grip on his throat once again.
Miki looked up at the tiny, smoking hole hundreds of meters above them, where the light from the arena looked like nothing more than a faint little star.
“No idea,” she answered with a trembling undertone in her voice. “But we need to get out of here fast.”